CIADOCUMENTS

Guests

Edwidge Danticat,
Award-winning Haitian-American novelist. She is the author of several books including “Breath, Eyes, Memory”, “The Farming of the Bones”, “Krik? Krak!” and “The Dew Breaker.” Her latest book is a memoir called “Brother I’m Dying.” It tells the story of her uncle Joseph Dantica dying in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security.

The Central Intelligence Agency is coming under fire again. A government- appointed and Congressionally-mandated panel of historians says that stonewalling by the CIA on the release of decades-old documents is making an official US diplomatic history the target of ridicule and scorn.

The latest salvo against the CIA comes in the wake of sharp criticism earlier this year by a noted historian who served on the CIA’s own declassification panel. Professor George Herring, a professor of history at the University of Kentucky, who served for six years on a CIA panel that was supposed to help declassify the agency’s data, blasted the CIA’s release of selected Cold War records earlier this year as a snow job.

Guests:
• Warren F. Kimball, a professor of American diplomatic history at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He is the head of a 9-member advisory panel appointed by the Secretary of State and mandated by Congress to oversee official accounts of US diplomatic history.
• Pat M. Holt, the former chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He is the author of Secret Intelligence and Public Policy: A Dilemma for Democracy.